Apple is Big Brother, Says Motorola in Xoom Commercial

Motorola is drumming up excitement for its forthcoming Xoom tablet with a brand new, eyebrow-raising advert they posted on YouTube yesterday.

While the commercial looks like a rendered cut-scene from a low-budget computer game dating back to the beginning of this century, its message couldn’t be clearer – Apple is Big Brother and Motorola is about to break Cupertino’s monopoly on coolness when the Xoom tablet comes out. It opens with an amusing scene showing planet Earth slowly coming in focus, with Apple’s trademark white earbuds around the Equator – a nod at the iPod nation.

"2011 looks a lot like 1984," the caption says, alluding to both George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novel and Apple’s legendary Macintosh commercial of the same name which aired just one, during the 1984 Superbowl. The commercial then goes through a series familiar concepts taken from Apple’s 1984 advert, clearly meant to portray Apple as Big Brother without ever mentioning it by name. "One authority,""one design" and "one way to work," the lines read before proclaiming that it’s "time for more choices." The commercial then flashes through key Xoom features before signing off with the following line:

It’s time to explore. More freedom. It’s time to live a free life.

It would appear that Motorola will fittingly air the advert during the upcoming Superbowl, the move that’ll undoubtedly upset a lot of Apple fans. You can make judgment for yourself by comparing Motorola’s commercial and Apple’s original 1984 advert, both included below.

The 10.1-inch Xoom should dazzle customers with a 1280 by 800 touchscreen – enough to play 720p videos without resizing – Nvidia’s 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, a two-megapixel camera for video calling, a five-megapixel camera with LED flash on the back, 1080p video output via an HDMI port, 3G upgradeable to 4G and more. The gizmo will run Google’s Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" software created specifically for tablets that we recently examined in detail.